VERMONT — As her neighbors were on hour two of debating whether Israel was an “apartheid regime,” a Jewish mother in the audience sat in the back of the town hall, shaking.
“It was a visceral reaction,” she said.
Ten years ago, the woman and her husband left Israel to move to Bristol, Vermont—a 3,782-person town she described as the kind of place where you let your kids run outside barefoot and leave your doors unlocked. A child of the Second Intifada, she thought she had left behind the violence of the Middle East. But sitting in a folding chair, hearing words like land theft and occupied land of Palestine, the woman said she “no longer believed that I was safe.”
In early March, hundreds of towns across Vermont met for their annual town meeting—a tradition that stretches back to 1762. Bristol was one of nine considering a pledge condemning Israel as an “apartheid regime” guilty of “settler colonialism” and “military occupation.”
“The minute people hear I was born in Jerusalem, they stop listening,” the woman told the crowd. “You don’t have the lived experience to understand what really happens there and how difficult it is.”
“It’s a very, very complicated conflict,” she said. “My own dentist was an Arab from Jerusalem.”
She tried to tell them about the reality of Israel—how Arabs and Christians and Jews live there side by side, with equal rights. Her 80-year-old mother, she said, had spent the last weekend sleeping in a bomb shelter.
“Which one of you in this community who knows me, who knows my husband and knows my kids, have called or texted to check how my family is doing?” she asked. “None of you.”
“Oh, because it’s Israel, they’re the colonialists,” she said.
An hour later, at 11:01 p.m., the town passed the pledge.
